The World this Morning...

Some pictures of snow-shrouded trees, just because. (Taken on the way to Seven Sisters Underground this morning.)

It seems to have Stopped Snowing....

Two views from the rear of our house, taken just after midnight on 21 January.





While, inside, Judith continues to work on the fiendishly difficult jigsaw of a red squirrel that I bought in the National Trust shop on Brownsea Island last summer....

It's Still Snowing....

Not that it's actually visible in this photograph, so you'll just have to take my word for it...

Eight Hours of Snowfall

It began snowing shortly before 9.00am this morning, and hasn't stopped since. It's getting dark now, but before it became too dark I went out and took these pictures -- of, in order, our front garden from just outside the front door; our house, at the bottom of Jansons Road; another view of Jansons Road; and the Maysie Memorial Garden (founded and maintained by Judith) at the top of the road.

The State of The Pond

There may just possibly be a frog or two lurking in this. (Some of them do overwinter at the bottom -- others bury themselves in the log pile.

A Bird in The Garden

Perched on a branch of on of our apple trees, this chaffich, in its winter plumage. Out of shot to the left is the seed feeder which it had been eating from -- the scuffing away of the snow from below the feeder port is the give-away.

Snow, Sunday Morning

Two views from the bderoom window, taken just a few minutes ago. A light snow was falling -- and is continuing to fall as I write -- although the snowflakes don't actually show up in the photographs (chiz chiz).

The Allotment in Winter

As you may have heard, we've had a bit of snow over the past few days, which has (as usual) brought the country to a grinding halt. (Albeit not quite as halted as during the Big Freeze of 1963, caused by a Siberian anticyclone which sat over us for the first two months of the year. I remember it well; and this afternoon the BBC screened an old black-and-white documentary about its effects from its archives, made and first shown when the Freeze was still in progress. It featured a hand-drawn global weather map showing what I suspect may have been the first appearance on British television of an El Nino event, although at the time no one knew what it was or how it could affect the weather on the other side of the world.) So of course we had to go to the allotment to check that things were all right, to replenish the bird feedery there, and to take a few photographs. In order, these show the frozen surface of the pond with its covering of snow (compare it with the photograph posted on 24 December 2012 to see how, in the absence of rain, the water has fallen back to its normal level); a general overview of the allotment from outside the shed; the foot-prints left by (presumably) a fox alongside what appear to be those of a small child; and, just for contrast, some catkins on a willow tree near the entrance to the site (with Judith's gloved hand as a guide to their size). Willow catkins, at this time of year? Indeed; but until the temperatures fell just a few days ago, it has been a very mild winter, which has doubtless fooled parts of the natural world into thinking that it's already spring. It will be interesting to see, next time we visit, whether they've shrivelled and dropped off.









(The birds at the allotment were obviously pleased to have their feedery replenished: there was a sudden upsurge in the volume of their twittering as I put out a new fat bar and hung up the refilled seed feeder. By contrast, the birds which normally visit our garden have utterly vanished -- not at all the sort of behaviour to be expected when the weather turns colder and natural food is harder to find. Judith first suggested that this might be due to the mildness of the winter hitherto, as mentioned above; but even in mild winters small birds flock to our garden for the seed and other treats we hang up. Then we noticed that the thick covering of ivy along the fence of one of the gardens which backs onto ours had been cut right back, thus depriving small birds of the nearby cover they need when venturing into the open. As a consequence, all we've seen in our garden since the middle of December have been a few blackbirds and robins, neither of which are seed eaters. The sparrows, tits, chaffinches, goldfinches and even the wren which used to visit have obviously gone elsewhere. Thanks a bunch, uncaring ivy-cutting neighbour!)

Greetings to You All!

Mutti and Judith raise a glass to your health (three times three and with a heave-ho rumblelow). Joseph not shown, because he was taking the photograph.

We have Cut the Cake

....and positioned the two figurines which had to be removed to guard the gap we left:

Then We Went for a Walk....

....and, boy, was it damp. There is an old saying that when it rains in Muswell Hill, it floods in Tottenham, or (more succinctly) that “Highgate's rain is Tottenham's pain”. The former Broadwater Farm (when it was a working farm) was named because it stood in the area where the Moselle Brook, which carried away the rain which fell on the higher ground to the west, would routinely overflow during storms; even though the Moselle was later culverted to prevent flooding, the ground through which it ran would still become waterlogged after heavy rains.

Lordship Recreation Ground (popularly known as the Rec) occupies much of the former farmland and was recently restored after many years of neglect. As part of the restoration, the stretch of the Moselle which passes through the Rec was deculverted and landscaped to form a natural water feature. But far too much rain has fallen in the past few days for it to completely drain the ground, as these photographs taken on a walk around the area this afternoon show -- the lake is so full that it has overflowed into the adjacent woodland, the field drain which is supposed to carry away water from the football pitch is working overtime to achieve not very much, and the footballers have given up because playing in a puddle isn't much fun.

The bottom photograph shows a back view of Judith and Mutti at the entrance to the Rec's Model Traffic Area, opened in 1938 to teach children about the rules of the road. A comparison of my photograph with the one on the linked webpage shows how decayed it had become compared to how it is now.

Cooking the Goose

Three stages in the cooking of the goose for our dinner today: firstly weighing the bird, after its extraction from the freezer yesterday, to calculate the cooking time:



....putting in the home-made stuffing (breadcrumbs, apricots, onions, eggs, Vietnamese coriander) after breakfast this morning, once the bird had completely thawed out:



....piercing the bird with a skewer after a few hours in the oven, to check that it was cooking correctly (the blurred hand of the Judith shows that this was an activity captured in real-time, not posed):

Decorating the Cake

Today we did a bit of last-minute food shopping (including the all-important gin-and-tonic for pre-dinner drinks), then went to the allotment to dig up some parsnips to go with our goose tomorrow. Then the Wugster and Mutti got stuck into icing and decorating the cake -- apart from the decoration added by myself, being a tableau of painted lead fantasy figurines (as once used in Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games and not looked at or even taken out of their box for getting on for thirty years) surrounding a sleeping pottery dragon which otherwise gathers dust on one of the shelves on Judith's side of the bed. (It is, in fact, a recreation of a tableau made for a Christmas cake when we were still living in Pimlico, in the 1980s. What goes around must, clearly, come around again.)

Below are photographs of (a) the freshly-washed parsnips, (b) a view of the allotment in its rather forlorn-looking winter state (with its crop of plastic milk bottles on the ends of poles and, thanks to the heavy rain of the past couple of days, a very full pond), and (c) the completed cake. The rather wonky pale green trees around the edges of the cake are its sole seasonal gesture.

Making a Christmas Cake (revisited)

Mutti arrived this afternoon, to stay with us for the holiday period; so today was the day to start finishing off the cake made last month. This entailed first applying jam to the surface of the cake, to provide a substrate to which the (bought-in, ready-made) marzipan could be attached; then discovering, once it had been rolled out, that we didn't have enough marzipan to completely cover the cake. Oh well!

The cake now has to be left for 24 hours, for the marzipan to dry; then the icing can be applied. In the meantime, here are some photographs of the cake-makers at work: the Wugster rolling out the marzipan; the Wugster applying the jam; and the Wugster and Mutti applying the marzipan.

Making a Christmas Cake

Christmas is still a month-and-a-half away, but we have had to start making plans because this year it's our turn to host Mutti. This will almost certainly be a bit of trial, since she expects things to be done Just So, even when she's not in her own house, but it does provide me with a magnificent opportunity to nag Judith into Massively Tidying Up Her Clutter -- as well as providing me with one or two deadlines for the completion of various tasks before Mutti arrives.

Perhaps because we'll be hosting Mutti, however, Judith decided that she should make a traditional Christmas cake -- something which to my knowledge she has never done before, at least not in the thirty years we've been together. So I took a few photographs of the process -- you will note the CWA cookery book, from which the recipe was taken, in the foreground of the first! The final photograph shows the cake minutes after its removal from the oven, left to cool down before icing and whatnot can be applied.

We'll have to see if was can locate some appropriate Christmas cake decorations, to recreate the scene that Mutti used to do decades ago, when I was very young: Father Christmas on his sleigh, coming down through the trees to Pooh's house. Ah -- nostalgia!